Stray Pearls eBook

Poor Armand, would he have been able, even as a maimed
man, to keep his word? We never knew, for, after
seeming for a fortnight to be on the way to recovery,
he took a turn for the worse, and after a few days
of suffering, which he bore much better than the first,
there came that cessation of pain which the doctors
declared to mean that death was beginning its work.
He was much changed by these weeks of illness.
He seemed to have passed out of that foolish worldly
dream that had enchanted him all his poor young life;
he was scarcely twenty-seven, and to have ceased from
that idol-worship of the Prince which had led him
to sacrifice on that shrine the wife whom he had only
just learned to love and prize. ‘Ah! sister,’
he said to me, ’I see now what Philippe would
have made me.’

He asked my pardon most touchingly for his share in
trying to abduct me, and Clement Darpent’s also
for the attack on him, though, as he said, Darpent
had long before shown his forgiveness. His little
children were brought to him, making large eyes with
fright at his deathlike looks, and clinging to their
mother, too much terrified to cry when he kissed them,
blessed them, and bade Maurice consider his mother,
and obey her above all things, and to regard me as
next to her.

’Ah! if I had had such a loving mother I should
never have become so brutally selfish,’ he said;
and, indeed, the sight of her sweet, tender, patient
face seemed to make him grieve for all the sins of
his dissipated life. His confessor declared that
he was in the most pious disposition of penitence.
And thus, one summer evening, with his wife, Madame
Darpent, and myself watching and praying round him,
Armand d’Aubepine passed away from the temptations
that beset a French noble.

I took my poor Cecile home sinking into a severe illness,
which I thought for many days would be her death.
All her old terror of Madame Croquelebois returned,
and for many nights and days Madame Darpent or I had
to be constantly with her, though we had outside troubles
enough of our own. Those two sick-rooms seem
to swallow up my recollection.

CHAPTER XXXII

ESCAPE

(Annora’s Narrative)

There was indeed a good deal passing beyond those
rooms where Margaret was so absorbed in her d’Aubepines
that I sometimes thought she forgot her own kindred
in them. Poor things! they were in sad case,
though how Cecile could break her heart over a fellow
who had used her so vilely, I could never understand.
He repented, they said. So much the better
for him; but a pretty life he would have led her if
he had recovered. Why, what is there for a French
noble to do but to fight, dance attendance on the
King, and be dissipated? There is no House of
Lords, no Quarter-Sessions, no way of being useful;
and if he tried to improve his peasantry he is a dangerous
man, and they send him a lettre de cachet. He